I know I'm advertising myself as a core 3 at the moment but every time I think of my stress responses, they look more like 5 responses. I could be wrong, though.
Weekly-level stresses:
1) I avoid what I should be doing by seeking out a quick fix in the form of connections/interaction—people, ideas, etc. And then I obsess over them. E.g. I do a slew of forum posts because I want to connect with someone; or I pick up an idea (like Enneagram) and think of nothing else for a while.
2) Become closed and perceive almost everyone as an intrusion.
These two result in my sitting in my room, in the dark, on the computer surfing the internet and getting irritable if anyone opens my door before I’m ready to come out. After a few hours of this, though, I seem to settle and I come out to eat and talk in a much better mood. It’s like I rebalance myself. If I’m extra-stressed, though, I just stay in my room the entire day and I don’t re-balance at all.
Increased stress / long-term stress:
3) Noisy head. I dwell on what I perceive to be past mistakes and they loop around in my mind. Sometimes, I re-imagine interactions so that they worked out better. This isn't deliberate. The mistakes can be to do with social interactions that I feel I messed up. Or it might just be a sense that I'm messing up and people know/will know.
4) Feel restless / fixate on the idea of something physically intense. I once became obsessed with getting a motorbike though I've never so much as touched one. I spent a lot of time imagining what it must be like—but knew myself well enough to know that I didn’t really want one. Otherwise, I might fixate on what I perceive to be a tangible problem like my room being messy, or my desk being in the wrong position. The environment feels wrong; too cramped; another form of intrusion. I have to fix it or I will be angry/feel helpless.
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I have often been surprised by the strength of my fixations. It is as though all the noise gets channeled into the one fixation and so my mind becomes a different kind of noisy—in a way, more pleasant because I am thinking of things that are more fun. But my mind is not really under my own control by that point either. It is inflexible and runs in circles. So…there are trade-offs.
